LLM-Powered Fully Automated Chaos Engineering: Towards Enabling Anyone to Build Resilient Software Systems at Low Cost

TL;DR

This paper introduces ChaosEater, an LLM-powered system that automates the entire chaos engineering process for Kubernetes-based systems, making resilience testing accessible and cost-effective for anyone.

Contribution

It presents a novel system that automates chaos engineering workflows using LLMs, reducing manual effort and costs in building resilient software systems.

Findings

Successfully automates CE cycles on Kubernetes systems

Reduces time and monetary costs significantly

Qualitatively validated by engineers and LLMs

Abstract

Chaos Engineering (CE) is an engineering technique aimed at improving the resilience of distributed systems. It involves intentionally injecting faults into a system to test its resilience, uncover weaknesses, and address them before they cause failures in production. Recent CE tools automate the execution of predefined CE experiments. However, planning such experiments and improving the system based on the experimental results still remain manual. These processes are labor-intensive and require multi-domain expertise. To address these challenges and enable anyone to build resilient systems at low cost, this paper proposes ChaosEater, a system that automates the entire CE cycle with Large Language Models (LLMs). It predefines an agentic workflow according to a systematic CE cycle and assigns subdivided processes within the workflow to LLMs. ChaosEater targets CE for software systems built on Kubernetes. Therefore, the LLMs in ChaosEater complete CE cycles through software engineering tasks, including requirement definition, code generation, testing, and debugging. We evaluate ChaosEater through case studies on small- and large-scale Kubernetes systems. The results demonstrate that it consistently completes reasonable CE cycles with significantly low time and monetary costs. Its cycles are also qualitatively validated by human engineers and LLMs.